May 30, 2024 • 36 mins
Stacey Rutherford thought she knew her husband and everything happening in her household. However, a disturbing discovery forces her to confront uncomfortable questions about Justin and her perception. Their loving home, once filled with laughter and friends, was now filled with distrust and uncertainty.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
She was embarrassed. It's her home. She's the wife, the mother.
She had no knowledge of that device being there. But realistically,
the first time we were in the home, we didn't
know who placed it there. I mean, Justin was acting
like a suspect by not talking to us in the
way he was acting.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is betrayal. Season three, Episode two,
Good Moms. A listener note. Some names have been changed
to protect privacy. Stacy Rutherford had met her soulmate, doctor
Justin Rutherford, in twenty fifteen. They had been together for
(00:55):
five years. Mikaela, Stacy's eldest, was off to college, and
Tyler started high school. They were all enjoying the two
youngest additions to the family. Stacy's two older kids loved
having young siblings. They called them the littles. Here's Tyler.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
My little siblings would always call me Bubby.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
It's fun.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
It's good.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Like on days when you're feeling sad. They don't know
what's going on, but just a hug from them makes
you feel so much better.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Justin was providing for his family and involved with all
four kids. He took Tyler to hockey practice. He helped
michaeleb pay for school at penn State, and he was
the dad who got on the floor with the kids.
Stacy showed me some videos of Justin and the littles.
(01:50):
It's hard not to smile when you hear the kids
squealing with delight. Tyler's friends enjoyed having Justin around, especially
when it came to gaming. He was always down for
a game of Call of Duty.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
FID friends over and we needed another person to fill
up the game, they'd have him come in. I mean
that was like his outside of work passion.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Stacy felt fulfilled as a doctor's wife and mother of
four in Pennsylvania. But like any couple, Stacy and Justin
had their issues. Physical intimacy was one of the areas
where they were not on the same page. Even while dating,
Stacy found Justin's lack of libido concerning.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
We never had a normal sex life. The only time
he ever seemed to really want to have sex was
when we were trying to get pregnant. He always had
problems performing. He just always explained it that, oh Med
school is very hard. You know, I'm stressed a lot,
and then it would turn into, well, you know, I've
(02:51):
never been a very sexual person, and I remember, you know,
having conversations with like my girlfriends like is it me?
Is it my weight? And I ended up talking to
one of the doctors I worked with and I was like,
I need to ask you a question like is it
common from residents to have to use viagara or just
not have a sex drive? And they were like, oh, yeah,
that's very common. So then I felt like a horrible person, like,
(03:14):
you know, he's just really stressed out, and here I
am making a big deal of it. And so I
was willing to sacrifice that part of our relationship to
have all of the good that we had.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
And some of the good Justin offered was his intrinsic
approach with children. He was a natural. He spoke their language.
Speaker 5 (03:32):
All of the kids that we ever have been around, niece's, nephew's, residents, kids,
everybody gravitated towards him because he was like a big kid.
For me, it warmed my heart because I was like, oh,
I want a man that's good with kids.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
But sometimes Justin took it too far and Stacy had
to remind him that he was the father in the family.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
Like one time, you know, all the boys over at
our house day the night, swam in the pool and
they all went and got plato, including my husband, and
made plato penises. Of course, for teenage boys, you know
you're gonna be like, ah, that's you know, they were laughing,
I'm sure, But for an adult ticket on that, I
was like, justin, you're thirty some years old. It was
(04:13):
like there was never this understanding that he was the parent.
They were the kids.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
But Stacy was never seeking perfection.
Speaker 5 (04:20):
I always looked at it as that's justin. He was
an only child. He's immature, you know. My sister always
used to call on Peter Pan. He just wanted to
be a boy forever.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
The Rutherford House was a hub for guests, full parties
and friends. There were sleepovers too, and with kids going
over to swim, a lot of them changed and showered
at the house. It was a completely normal happening. But
one afternoon Tyler had a couple of friends over who
left in a hurry.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
I had my friends over and we were kind of
just having a pool day. Everything was going fine. We
even planned to later on go to like a trampoline
park of so sort. They had gone upstairs to change
out of their swim trunks into their normal clothes and
then out of nowhere. They had said their aunt texted
them or uncle someone around those lines, and they needed
(05:16):
to leave. Didn't really give much information as to why,
but they made it seem as if it was something
very urgent, and within twenty minutes they were out the
door and they were gone. I found it odd, but
I just kind of assumed it was some family emergency,
someone had gotten hurt, something like that.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Tyler didn't really know what happened, but didn't dwell on
it either. Later on that night, another strange incident occurred.
They had an unexpected visit from Social Services.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
There was a tip to DCFS that he had asked
two of Tyler's friends to do inappropriate things in the
shower together.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
DCFS is the Division of Children and Family Services. It's
a government agency that investigates the mistreatment and abuse of children.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
And I'm like, that's not true. I was here all day, like,
he never was alone with anybody, And they said, okay,
well we're investigating this, and because Tyler is not Justin's
biological child, he has to leave the house.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Stacey had no idea what they were talking about, but
it didn't matter. It was upsetting. Imagine Social Services knocking
on your door telling you that your husband is suspected
of inappropriate, possibly criminal behavior. The Division of Children and
Family Services was investigating. Tyler would stay just down the
street with a close friend until it was over.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
That social worker came back to the house and said,
we've interviewed Tyler. He loves his stepdad, he's happy here,
he seems safe. We think he's fine to come home,
you know, she said, Sometimes in situations like this, where
there is a doctor and there's money involved, it could
have been somebody who thought, you know, oh, let's you know,
(07:06):
make up something and see if they'll pay us off.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Justin agreed, telling Stacy it had to be a money grab.
So Stacy was relieved when Social Services told them they
were dropping the case.
Speaker 5 (07:21):
We were just like ecstatic, like, oh my gosh, our
lives can go back to normal.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
And for a little while they resumed their everyday routine.
But then Stacy saw something that made her realize they
couldn't go back to normal.
Speaker 5 (07:37):
I'm downstairs with the little ones and Justin had been
gone for a little while, and I'm like, where is
he at? I go upstairs to our bedroom. And when
I tell you that it was like a movie, I
mean it was like a movie. He was encrypting his computer,
like the stuff coming down the screen.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I imagine it looked like this from the matrix when
it starts raining down code.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
And I stood there and he turned around and he said, oh, great, great,
And I said what are you doing? And he said, listen,
you know, if we've got somebody coming after us and
this and that, I'm encrypting my computer. Stacy and I
know what you think. You know. We kept saying I
know what you think, and I'm like, you're damn right,
I know what I think. From that moment on, I
(08:27):
knew something was wrong.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Stacy felt something in her gut, and it changed the
way she viewed her husband from that day on.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
We had family time every night before bet you know
we still had those after all that. But it wasn't
the normal happy family night. It was Mom sits on
the couch on her phone, ignores everyone and everything, and
Justin tries to play it cool and act normal. But
(08:59):
you can still tell something's not right. She wouldn't sit
next to him, she wouldn't touch him, Kisses reforced. Nothing
was like the usual.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Stacy performed the role of wife and mother, acting out
the parts well enough to keep her household from collapsing,
but in her head, she was preparing for the worst
case scenarios.
Speaker 5 (09:21):
With my first divorce, I felt helpless because I wasn't working.
I had just quit my job and he was letting
me open up a home daycare, and within weeks of that,
everything imploded.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
So she made sure she could always work and make
a living. It's the reason she kept her certified nursing
assistant credentials up to date.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
So I think with Justin, I just was like, I'm good,
Like I'll stay working.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
As much as she loved Justin and her life in Pennsylvania,
she was not naive. She wouldn't make the same mistake again.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
I want to say it was like a divine thing,
but I always just had this feeling at any moment,
the bottom could fall out, Stacy, and you need to
be prepared.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
And sure enough, a few weeks later, the other shoe
finally dropped when she was met by a detective at
her front door.
Speaker 5 (10:16):
I get home and I pull in and there's all
these vans and SUVs just flood my driveway, and I
walk up to the house and an armed officer of
like you know, Mam, calm down, come downstairs with me
and laid out on our couch was a device torn apart,
and then photos of my kids all naked in the shower.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Stacy had suspicions about her husband, but was not expecting
a police raid. Now she was standing in her home
watching a scene right out of the crime shows she
watched on television. Sergeant Mike Fick, a detective with the
Burkes County District Attorney's Office.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Amity Township Police Department received information that juveniles in a
home of Justin Rutherford saw something in a bathroom that
they didn't know what it was.
Speaker 5 (11:19):
One of the.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Juveniles took a picture of it and sent it to
his mother. The mother researched it and found that it
was a camera. Juveniles removed it with the SIM card and.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Took it home. The Rutherford family lived in Amity Township.
Sergeant Vic explained how it got to the county.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Amity asked us if we would take the case because
we have more knowledge and experience in this field. The
good news is the evidence was secured. We wanted to
have our forensic Services unit withdraw the information on the
SIM card and see exactly what was recorded on that device.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
The police had investigating the secret camera since Social services
first came into their home three weeks prior. Investigators found
images of several children and a handful of adults using
the bathroom and showering.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
A lot of the boys will go in and of
course when they stand to yearinate, he would capture that
his step daughter. I believe our boyfriend those people were captured,
but realistically we didn't know who placed it there.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
It was concerning enough to warrant further investigation.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
We executed a search warrant at the house and at
that time we were in there to take every electronic device.
Rutherford was there when we went to take his cell phone,
he actually tried to delete something from it quick. We
had to secure him and take the phone from him.
He didn't want to talk to us. He said he's
(12:51):
got have a lawyer, so of course we couldn't question
him any further. I mean, Justin was acting like a suspect.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
OK.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So there was a camera in the bathroom. Justin was
being uncooperative.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
One picture was Justin's hand and they asked me if
I could identify his wedding ring, and I said, yes,
that's his wedding ring. And they told me, well, we're
here because we have reason to believe that he placed
a camera in this bathroom to record your son and
his friend's undressed.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And just then Tyler came home from work.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
I was working landscaping at the time and walking down
to the house and I noticed there's all sorts of
cars and I'm thinking, I'm about to walk into one
of our family parties. It's about to be a fun night.
I opened the door and there's like six police standing
there in front of me. I was all covered in
grass clippings and MUDs. I was stinky, I was dirty.
(13:49):
I was ready to go take a shower, and I
asked him, I kind of see what's going on. Can
I just go take a shower? And then he was
like no. So they had sent me downstairs, and they'd
broke the news that there was cameras in the house
and that most of the allegations are most likely true.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
While Stacey felt something was off, she wasn't expecting the
police to show up with the search warrant, and she
certainly wasn't expecting what they were showing her.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
I remember crying and just I kept saying, oh my God, Like,
what kind of mother doesn't know this? One of the
police officers grabbed a holding and just held me while
I cried. He kept saying, good moms, good moms, Stacy.
He said, the whole time we investigated you, we were
in every area of your life, your emails, your facebooks,
your everything. The whole time, he said. The one thing
(14:44):
we kept saying over and over was this woman has
no idea what's about to happen in her life.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Tyler was trying to process the whole scene, his mother
crying downstairs, his stepfather's stonewall upstairs.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
I finally got to go take my shower as they
were getting ready to leave. I'm usually a five minute,
ten minute shower kind of guy. I get my job done,
I leave, but that shower was different. I just stood
in there and pretty much cried the whole time. Head
against the wall, eyes closed, water falling down my head.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Tyler knew what was at stake, and he knew they
would not be staying in this house or in this life.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
We had everything we ever dreamed of growing up. We
had an in ground pool, and to me that was
the craziest thing. Like I thought billionaires had in ground pools.
It had a slide, like I thought. We had a
water park in the backyard. And he took us on
our first cruise, and I mean I had a nice
like fifteen hundred dollars gaming PC, pretty much anything a
(15:55):
kid could want.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
After the raid happened, they told me Social Service, we'll
be contacting you.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Detectives took the family's electronic devices and left. This was
a mission to find and collect evidence, not to arrest Justin.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
At that point, he was standing in the kitchen and
he started to talk to me and I said, just
shut the fuck up. I don't want to hear another
word out of your mouth. I need you to get
your shit and I need you to get out of
my house. And he was like, you're going to ruin
our marriage over this. Are you serious, Stacy? I said, no,
you ruined our marriage. I said, they showed me everything
(16:32):
down there. Justin He was like, I didn't do this,
you know, that's all lies.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Justin was maintaining his innocence. He started naming all of
the kids who might have been the culprit, but the
detective had wisely shown Stacey the photo of Justin's hand,
presumably testing the camera, and.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
I was like, m you gotta go. I said, it's
either you or me and these kids, so you need
to make it. And he's like, well, I'm not going
to make you and the kids leave the house tonight.
So that he ended up going and staying with one
of his co residents and just told her that we
were going through a divorce and that he just needed
a place to crash.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Stacy and the kids needed family and friends who were
like family, but those folks were back home in Virginia.
Once this story about Justin got back to his employer,
this house, they loved, this job he had worked so
hard for. It would all be over.
Speaker 5 (17:27):
The day after the raid, we were putting the house
of her sale. His mentality was, I'll finish out my
contract here, you know, and then we'll slowly work on,
like rebuilding our relationship. I mean, at the time, I
was trying to play the part like oh yeah, maybe,
but I was just like, oh yeah, Bunny, that's not happening.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Justin was adamant that he was innocent, but Stacy no
longer cared. She just wanted to keep her kids safe.
Speaker 5 (17:55):
I called my sister and I said, this is what's
going down. I think it's going to be bad. She
was like, oh my god, you got to get the
babies out of that house. And I said, I told
him he had to leave, but I'm moving home, and
she was like, shit, Stacy. School starts next week.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Heather was concerned about Tyler. He was in high school
and this move would mean a new school for him.
That was hard enough.
Speaker 5 (18:21):
She was like, we got to get him here to
get him enrolled in school. He can't get behind me.
I tell my husband what's going on, and my husband
says to me, we're going to get siglent her. And
my husband is one of those people that not a
lot of people will argue with.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
He's not taking over an answer. Tyler loved his ant Heather,
and knew on the day of the raid that his
life was going to change, but he never could have
predicted it would happen so fast.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
I'd gotten a text from my mom, Hey, when you
get home tonight, we're gonna pack up all your stuff.
You're going to live with your aunt. Heather like, Bam,
it's really getting real. Woke up that next morning. My
friend had come over because I'd told him I was leaving.
This was the same friend I'd stayed at after Social
(19:07):
Services came, so he kind of knew what was going on.
We hugged, which was not like us. You know, teenage
boys don't really do that, and like he actually shed
some tears.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
I did too.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
It was kind of like heartfelt but sad at the
same time. He was my best friend. I didn't have
much to leave him, but I was like, take this xbox,
It'll be like a good remember me bye. And then
I was off to my aunts to live for the
next year and a half or so.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
We've all seen those stories when a person with men
suddenly falls and is about to lose everything. Many times
they don't just bow out, They take people with them.
Usually it's those closest. Justin had lost his family, had
(20:09):
not seen his biological children, and it was just a
matter of time before he lose his ability to practice medicine.
What then, Stacy's mind went to worst case scenarios.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
I slept with a loaded gun next to me for
a long time. I Mean, my thought was his life
is falling apart. He's going to take us all down
with him.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
As heartbreaking as it was. Stacy moved quickly and put
the house on the market. I don't know if you
remember the housing market in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
I do.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
It didn't take long for prospective buyers to start looking
at Stacy's home.
Speaker 5 (20:52):
We were there at the house and they said the
new tenants were going to come for a walkthrough. I
think they got there early, so they came in and
I was They just kind of opened the door, walked
in and I was like, oh, I'm sorry, and I
just remember looking at him and I said, you know,
you're getting a really good house. It's a really good neighborhood.
I said, You're just you're really gonna love it here.
(21:14):
I said, I love my time here.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Her loss was there again, even in that moment, she
showed grace. She loved that house, she loved the life
she thought she was living. Mikayla had been living away
at college. Stacey knew that it would only be a
matter of time before she'd hear what happened. Stacey wanted
(21:36):
to be the one to tell her, but she didn't
want to break this type of news over the phone,
so she invited Mikaela and her boyfriend Tommy for the weekend.
When Michaela arrived at the house, she noticed something was
off right away.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Get there, and it's just oddly quiet in this house.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
That's when her much younger sister spilled the beans.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
She looks me dead in the face and says, Daddy
doesn't live here anymore, and Bubby's living with Aunt Heather.
And I was like what, And Mom, who hasn't said anything,
explained everything. You know that they raided the house. They
took all electronics.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Mikhayla thought there had to be some kind of mistake.
She just couldn't wrap her head around it, not justin.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
Immediately.
Speaker 4 (22:29):
I was kind of like, are we sure? You know
people put nanny cams all the time? Was it an accident?
Was it supposed to be like downstairs to maybe make
sure Dee, who lived with us, was taking care of
the kids, and somebody moved it.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
The stress of everything that was going on seemed to
be getting to justin. One of his patients noticed a
total transformation in his bedside manner.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
My name is Christina CALVAESSI I have to go to
the doc or for regular checkups. So I went and
I visited him. I liked him a lot. He was
very talkative, very interested to me. It was a great doctor.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Until he became preoccupied with his own problems.
Speaker 6 (23:16):
I never had an issue with him until the medication
that he put me on. It crippled me. I could
not walk. It was actually destroying my muscles, and the
side effects of that medication were exactly the side effects
that I was having. When I called his office and
(23:36):
asked that he called me back and talked to me directly,
he was very abrupt. It was not the same doctor
Rutherford that I knew.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Justin kept working. He still hadn't been charged with a crime. Still,
word of the raid was spreading through their circle of
friends and community.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
About a week or so later, I get a snapchat
message from one of Tyler's friends.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
It was a boy she knew well.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
He was at the house all the time when I
lived there. It was like another little brother to me.
We've had difficult conversations in the past about anxiety and depression.
He disclosed to me that Justin had sexually abused him.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Mikayla was devastated.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
I pulled over on the side of the road. I'm
like bawling my eyes out.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
I did tell him like I'm so sorry that happened
to you, but as somebody who works in healthcare, I
have to mandate report or I could lose my job.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Michaela was working in an outpatient psychiatry department, and she
took her mandate seriously. She explained that the police was
probably contact his parents and that she would be there
for him. But inside, Michaela was heartbroken. Justin was her dad.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
It was hard, you know, when you love somebody so much.
There's that little part that's like, what the heck is
going on?
Speaker 5 (25:19):
There's no way that.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
He could have done this, And then the bigger part
of me is like it doesn't matter, Like this kid
just told you that he was abused. You take that seriously.
Speaker 5 (25:30):
It's real.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Mikayla didn't go to work that day. Instead, she turned
around and drove herself straight to the police precinct to
report the text.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
On my way there, I had called my mom. I
asked her who the detectives were, and I think she
knew something was wrong. So I'm like, okay, I wasn't
gonna tell you.
Speaker 5 (25:53):
You're at work.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
I'm trying to drive. I'm trying to still process it,
but this is what happened.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Mikayla met with the detective at the police station to
share the text. It was evidence.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
I gave them my phone and they made copies or screenshots.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
These were serious allegations and now it was in the
detective's hands. She was a wreck and concern for the
victim that there wasn't much more for Mikayla to do,
or at least she thought. Detectives eventually pivoted and asked
her for help with the hitting camera case they were
building against Justin.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
And then they were like, we're gonna show you a
bunch of pictures. We need you to identify the individuals,
and the pictures.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
They were screen grabs the forensic team had pulled from
the hitting camera.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
And then they whip out this huge finder and they
just start flipping through it and it's like my brother's friends,
family members, all these people sitting on the toilet, brushing
their tea, using the shower. It was literally anything you
can think of.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
No one ever noticed the camera because it was disguised
as an everyday household item.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
It was like a cube and it charged your phone,
so it worked just like a phone block, but it
had a camera inside of it.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Mikhaela was still processing the abuse allegations and this new responsibility.
While it was awkward and just plain awful sitting there
identifying people hundreds of photos laid out in binders, Detectives
did their best to make her comfortable. Seeing your friends
(27:40):
and family getting in and out of the shower, they're naked.
Can you imagine it couldn't cover them up at least?
And when she thought it couldn't get any.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
Worse, it whipped out another binder and it was me.
So I dye my hair a lot, and I had
to identify myself in every different hairstyle, every different hair color.
And then they let me know that some of these
pictures were actually like they had clipped it from a video,
and the one picture was actually Tommy and I in
(28:13):
the bathroom together doing like sexual acts. I said, how
many people have seen this video? And he told me
all of the forensic team, all of the detectives on
the case, and I was like as white as a ghost.
Speaker 5 (28:29):
I wanted to throw up.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
And who could blame her? Detectives went to interview the
boy who said he was abused by Justin. Here's Sergeant
Fick again.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
I personally did a forensic interview and interviewed him, and
he disclosed being sexually abused by Justin.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Still, there were no charges, but Stacy wanted to get
away from the house. She reached a breaking point.
Speaker 5 (28:55):
I took the kids immediately and left the house with
nothing and went to Michaela's because her building was secure.
If you had to have a key to get in
the front, you had to have a key to get
on the elevator, and that key had to match the
floor that you lived on too.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Stacy shared the terrible development with her sister, Heather, and
Heather told Tyler at least her son was safe with
Heather and Virginia. For Stacy, Heather, and Mikayla, there was
a question that permeated all of their thoughts. If Justin
sexually assaulted Tyler's friend, was it possible that he prayed
on Tyler as well. Michayla couldn't stop thinking about that
(29:33):
text and her younger brother.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
Honestly, as soon as I opened the message from him,
I could feel it in my gut that he wasn't
the only one.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Stacy checked in with Tyler often. She asked him multiple
times if he was okay. She asked him after social
services came. She asked him again after the raid and
thought it was agonizing to raise it with him again.
She even asked her son after the sexual assault victim
came forward. He always reassured her, But there was so
(30:07):
much she didn't know, so much that happened right in
front of her. But she remembered what social services told her.
Speaker 5 (30:15):
We've interviewed Tyler. He loves his stepdad. If he's happy here,
he seems safe.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Everything was different now nobody had been safe. Heather thought
she had the best chance of approaching Tyler. He was
staying in her house.
Speaker 5 (30:33):
Heather was very proactive about something happened to Tyler. If
he did it to another boy, I just know it.
So she started immediately asking questions.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Her sister sought advice from a friend who was a
social worker. Here's Heather. She's like, you can't push him,
you can't pull it out of him. You just need
to continue to let him know that you're there.
Speaker 5 (30:59):
If he wants to check, you know you're there. They
would talk about it and then she'd let it go.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
While Stacey was agonizing over what may have happened to Tyler,
she noticed that Justin was making some unusual financial transactions.
She reached out a detective Weaver, who she had met
the knight of the raid.
Speaker 5 (31:17):
I remember texting Weaver in them saying he's going to run.
I feel it he's drawn out money. Oh, we got
eyes on him. We're good work.
Speaker 6 (31:24):
Good.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Detectives were not in a hurry to arrest Justin. They
were more interested in building a strong case than a
fast one. Remember, Stacy had caught him encrypting his computer,
so the only evidence they had in their case against
Justin at this point was the simcard from the camera
in the bathroom. But the victim coming forward, you may
(31:45):
be thinking there had to be an arrest warrant soon. Well,
not necessarily. Detectives were trying to corroborate the victim's story.
Law enforcement wouldn't just make an arrest without sufficient evidence.
They would need more.
Speaker 5 (32:01):
When it was just the camera charges, Detective Weaver had
said to me, this was a misdemeanor act, and that
with him having a clear history and no arrests or
any violence or anything like that, that they would look
at that, and they would look at kind of who
he was in society, and that more than likely he
would just get probation out of it, and it was
(32:25):
gross to me to think that you could walk away
with a misdemeanor and just have probation for looking at
naked children.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Maybe that was Justin's purpose for hiding the camera in
the bathroom, but the simcard contained images of children and adults.
A defense attorney could argue that it wasn't meant for
just kids. It was no slam dunk for a prosecutor.
Speaker 5 (32:50):
It was scary because I thought he's going to get
a misdemeanor. I mean, people get misdemeanors for stupid stuff
and still are able to see their kids. My thought was,
he's still gonna have access.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
To our children.
Speaker 5 (33:04):
I knew I was leaving. I knew I was divorcing him,
like there was no question, but to think that I
would have had to possibly drive my children to his
home and drop them off was just nauseating to me.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Heather was on the receiving end of Stacy's anguish.
Speaker 7 (33:20):
My sister had just called me and she's crying and
she's like this is crazy, Like how are they gonna.
Speaker 5 (33:25):
Let him go? And I'm like I know, oh, you know,
God's got this. We're going to figure this out. I
do not believe in my heart of hearts, this man
is going to walk free. And Tyler's listening to this.
Speaker 7 (33:36):
And I got off the phone and he was helping
me full laundry, and I said, man, buddy, I said.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (33:42):
We gotta do some serious pray. And he's like, why,
what's up.
Speaker 7 (33:47):
I said, they're talking about only charging Justin with the
cameras and he goes, well, what does that mean? And
I said, well, that probably means your little brother will
have visitation with his father.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
In due time.
Speaker 5 (34:03):
And he just looked at me.
Speaker 7 (34:06):
With look I will never forget, and his eyes welled
up with tears. And Tyler says, he'll never see the
outside of a prison when I tell them what I do.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
He had heard enough. The thought of Justin being alone
with his little brother, the idea that he could have visitation.
That was the tipping point. Tyler was ready to talk.
On the next episode of Betrayal.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
You know, they were at work making the money, doing
their jobs, and I was doing my job, keeping my
mouth shut to keep the family.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
Together, and Justin makes a run for it.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
I go to the house and his side of the
closet is gone. All of his stuff was gone. I
was like, oh shit, he's on the run.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team,
email us at betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal
Pod at gmail dot com. Also, please be sure to
follow us at Glass Podcasts on Instagram for all Betrayal content,
news and updates. We're grateful for your support. One way
to show support is by subscribing to our show on
(35:27):
Apple Podcasts and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal.
Five star reviews go a long way. A big thank
you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production
of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in
partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by
Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by me
(35:48):
Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Kerry Hartman, also produced
by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin Melcurie and Grace Bollinger.
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Crincheck. Special
thanks to Stacy Rutherford Tyler and the rest of Stacy
and Tyler's friends and family. Audio editing and mixing by
(36:08):
Matt tal Vecchio, editing support from Nico Aruka. Betrayals theme
composed by Oliver Bains. Music library provided by Mob Music
and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
She was embarrassed. It's her home. She's the wife, the mother.
She had no knowledge of that device being there. But realistically,
the first time we were in the home, we didn't
know who placed it there. I mean, Justin was acting
like a suspect by not talking to us in the
way he was acting.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is betrayal. Season three, Episode two,
Good Moms. A listener note. Some names have been changed
to protect privacy. Stacy Rutherford had met her soulmate, doctor
Justin Rutherford, in twenty fifteen. They had been together for
(00:55):
five years. Mikaela, Stacy's eldest, was off to college, and
Tyler started high school. They were all enjoying the two
youngest additions to the family. Stacy's two older kids loved
having young siblings. They called them the littles. Here's Tyler.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
My little siblings would always call me Bubby.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
It's fun.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
It's good.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Like on days when you're feeling sad. They don't know
what's going on, but just a hug from them makes
you feel so much better.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Justin was providing for his family and involved with all
four kids. He took Tyler to hockey practice. He helped
michaeleb pay for school at penn State, and he was
the dad who got on the floor with the kids.
Stacy showed me some videos of Justin and the littles.
(01:50):
It's hard not to smile when you hear the kids
squealing with delight. Tyler's friends enjoyed having Justin around, especially
when it came to gaming. He was always down for
a game of Call of Duty.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
FID friends over and we needed another person to fill
up the game, they'd have him come in. I mean
that was like his outside of work passion.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Stacy felt fulfilled as a doctor's wife and mother of
four in Pennsylvania. But like any couple, Stacy and Justin
had their issues. Physical intimacy was one of the areas
where they were not on the same page. Even while dating,
Stacy found Justin's lack of libido concerning.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
We never had a normal sex life. The only time
he ever seemed to really want to have sex was
when we were trying to get pregnant. He always had
problems performing. He just always explained it that, oh Med
school is very hard. You know, I'm stressed a lot,
and then it would turn into, well, you know, I've
(02:51):
never been a very sexual person, and I remember, you know,
having conversations with like my girlfriends like is it me?
Is it my weight? And I ended up talking to
one of the doctors I worked with and I was like,
I need to ask you a question like is it
common from residents to have to use viagara or just
not have a sex drive? And they were like, oh, yeah,
that's very common. So then I felt like a horrible person, like,
(03:14):
you know, he's just really stressed out, and here I
am making a big deal of it. And so I
was willing to sacrifice that part of our relationship to
have all of the good that we had.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
And some of the good Justin offered was his intrinsic
approach with children. He was a natural. He spoke their language.
Speaker 5 (03:32):
All of the kids that we ever have been around, niece's, nephew's, residents, kids,
everybody gravitated towards him because he was like a big kid.
For me, it warmed my heart because I was like, oh,
I want a man that's good with kids.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
But sometimes Justin took it too far and Stacy had
to remind him that he was the father in the family.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
Like one time, you know, all the boys over at
our house day the night, swam in the pool and
they all went and got plato, including my husband, and
made plato penises. Of course, for teenage boys, you know
you're gonna be like, ah, that's you know, they were laughing,
I'm sure, But for an adult ticket on that, I
was like, justin, you're thirty some years old. It was
(04:13):
like there was never this understanding that he was the parent.
They were the kids.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
But Stacy was never seeking perfection.
Speaker 5 (04:20):
I always looked at it as that's justin. He was
an only child. He's immature, you know. My sister always
used to call on Peter Pan. He just wanted to
be a boy forever.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
The Rutherford House was a hub for guests, full parties
and friends. There were sleepovers too, and with kids going
over to swim, a lot of them changed and showered
at the house. It was a completely normal happening. But
one afternoon Tyler had a couple of friends over who
left in a hurry.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
I had my friends over and we were kind of
just having a pool day. Everything was going fine. We
even planned to later on go to like a trampoline
park of so sort. They had gone upstairs to change
out of their swim trunks into their normal clothes and
then out of nowhere. They had said their aunt texted
them or uncle someone around those lines, and they needed
(05:16):
to leave. Didn't really give much information as to why,
but they made it seem as if it was something
very urgent, and within twenty minutes they were out the
door and they were gone. I found it odd, but
I just kind of assumed it was some family emergency,
someone had gotten hurt, something like that.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Tyler didn't really know what happened, but didn't dwell on
it either. Later on that night, another strange incident occurred.
They had an unexpected visit from Social Services.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
There was a tip to DCFS that he had asked
two of Tyler's friends to do inappropriate things in the
shower together.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
DCFS is the Division of Children and Family Services. It's
a government agency that investigates the mistreatment and abuse of children.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
And I'm like, that's not true. I was here all day, like,
he never was alone with anybody, And they said, okay,
well we're investigating this, and because Tyler is not Justin's
biological child, he has to leave the house.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Stacey had no idea what they were talking about, but
it didn't matter. It was upsetting. Imagine Social Services knocking
on your door telling you that your husband is suspected
of inappropriate, possibly criminal behavior. The Division of Children and
Family Services was investigating. Tyler would stay just down the
street with a close friend until it was over.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
That social worker came back to the house and said,
we've interviewed Tyler. He loves his stepdad, he's happy here,
he seems safe. We think he's fine to come home,
you know, she said, Sometimes in situations like this, where
there is a doctor and there's money involved, it could
have been somebody who thought, you know, oh, let's you know,
(07:06):
make up something and see if they'll pay us off.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Justin agreed, telling Stacy it had to be a money grab.
So Stacy was relieved when Social Services told them they
were dropping the case.
Speaker 5 (07:21):
We were just like ecstatic, like, oh my gosh, our
lives can go back to normal.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
And for a little while they resumed their everyday routine.
But then Stacy saw something that made her realize they
couldn't go back to normal.
Speaker 5 (07:37):
I'm downstairs with the little ones and Justin had been
gone for a little while, and I'm like, where is
he at? I go upstairs to our bedroom. And when
I tell you that it was like a movie, I
mean it was like a movie. He was encrypting his computer,
like the stuff coming down the screen.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I imagine it looked like this from the matrix when
it starts raining down code.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
And I stood there and he turned around and he said, oh, great, great,
And I said what are you doing? And he said, listen,
you know, if we've got somebody coming after us and
this and that, I'm encrypting my computer. Stacy and I
know what you think. You know. We kept saying I
know what you think, and I'm like, you're damn right,
I know what I think. From that moment on, I
(08:27):
knew something was wrong.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Stacy felt something in her gut, and it changed the
way she viewed her husband from that day on.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
We had family time every night before bet you know
we still had those after all that. But it wasn't
the normal happy family night. It was Mom sits on
the couch on her phone, ignores everyone and everything, and
Justin tries to play it cool and act normal. But
(08:59):
you can still tell something's not right. She wouldn't sit
next to him, she wouldn't touch him, Kisses reforced. Nothing
was like the usual.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Stacy performed the role of wife and mother, acting out
the parts well enough to keep her household from collapsing,
but in her head, she was preparing for the worst
case scenarios.
Speaker 5 (09:21):
With my first divorce, I felt helpless because I wasn't working.
I had just quit my job and he was letting
me open up a home daycare, and within weeks of that,
everything imploded.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
So she made sure she could always work and make
a living. It's the reason she kept her certified nursing
assistant credentials up to date.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
So I think with Justin, I just was like, I'm good,
Like I'll stay working.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
As much as she loved Justin and her life in Pennsylvania,
she was not naive. She wouldn't make the same mistake again.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
I want to say it was like a divine thing,
but I always just had this feeling at any moment,
the bottom could fall out, Stacy, and you need to
be prepared.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
And sure enough, a few weeks later, the other shoe
finally dropped when she was met by a detective at
her front door.
Speaker 5 (10:16):
I get home and I pull in and there's all
these vans and SUVs just flood my driveway, and I
walk up to the house and an armed officer of
like you know, Mam, calm down, come downstairs with me
and laid out on our couch was a device torn apart,
and then photos of my kids all naked in the shower.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Stacy had suspicions about her husband, but was not expecting
a police raid. Now she was standing in her home
watching a scene right out of the crime shows she
watched on television. Sergeant Mike Fick, a detective with the
Burkes County District Attorney's Office.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Amity Township Police Department received information that juveniles in a
home of Justin Rutherford saw something in a bathroom that
they didn't know what it was.
Speaker 5 (11:19):
One of the.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Juveniles took a picture of it and sent it to
his mother. The mother researched it and found that it
was a camera. Juveniles removed it with the SIM card and.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Took it home. The Rutherford family lived in Amity Township.
Sergeant Vic explained how it got to the county.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Amity asked us if we would take the case because
we have more knowledge and experience in this field. The
good news is the evidence was secured. We wanted to
have our forensic Services unit withdraw the information on the
SIM card and see exactly what was recorded on that device.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
The police had investigating the secret camera since Social services
first came into their home three weeks prior. Investigators found
images of several children and a handful of adults using
the bathroom and showering.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
A lot of the boys will go in and of
course when they stand to yearinate, he would capture that
his step daughter. I believe our boyfriend those people were captured,
but realistically we didn't know who placed it there.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
It was concerning enough to warrant further investigation.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
We executed a search warrant at the house and at
that time we were in there to take every electronic device.
Rutherford was there when we went to take his cell phone,
he actually tried to delete something from it quick. We
had to secure him and take the phone from him.
He didn't want to talk to us. He said he's
(12:51):
got have a lawyer, so of course we couldn't question
him any further. I mean, Justin was acting like a suspect.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
OK.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So there was a camera in the bathroom. Justin was
being uncooperative.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
One picture was Justin's hand and they asked me if
I could identify his wedding ring, and I said, yes,
that's his wedding ring. And they told me, well, we're
here because we have reason to believe that he placed
a camera in this bathroom to record your son and
his friend's undressed.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And just then Tyler came home from work.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
I was working landscaping at the time and walking down
to the house and I noticed there's all sorts of
cars and I'm thinking, I'm about to walk into one
of our family parties. It's about to be a fun night.
I opened the door and there's like six police standing
there in front of me. I was all covered in
grass clippings and MUDs. I was stinky, I was dirty.
(13:49):
I was ready to go take a shower, and I
asked him, I kind of see what's going on. Can
I just go take a shower? And then he was
like no. So they had sent me downstairs, and they'd
broke the news that there was cameras in the house
and that most of the allegations are most likely true.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
While Stacey felt something was off, she wasn't expecting the
police to show up with the search warrant, and she
certainly wasn't expecting what they were showing her.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
I remember crying and just I kept saying, oh my God, Like,
what kind of mother doesn't know this? One of the
police officers grabbed a holding and just held me while
I cried. He kept saying, good moms, good moms, Stacy.
He said, the whole time we investigated you, we were
in every area of your life, your emails, your facebooks,
your everything. The whole time, he said. The one thing
(14:44):
we kept saying over and over was this woman has
no idea what's about to happen in her life.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Tyler was trying to process the whole scene, his mother
crying downstairs, his stepfather's stonewall upstairs.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
I finally got to go take my shower as they
were getting ready to leave. I'm usually a five minute,
ten minute shower kind of guy. I get my job done,
I leave, but that shower was different. I just stood
in there and pretty much cried the whole time. Head
against the wall, eyes closed, water falling down my head.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Tyler knew what was at stake, and he knew they
would not be staying in this house or in this life.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
We had everything we ever dreamed of growing up. We
had an in ground pool, and to me that was
the craziest thing. Like I thought billionaires had in ground pools.
It had a slide, like I thought. We had a
water park in the backyard. And he took us on
our first cruise, and I mean I had a nice
like fifteen hundred dollars gaming PC, pretty much anything a
(15:55):
kid could want.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
After the raid happened, they told me Social Service, we'll
be contacting you.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Detectives took the family's electronic devices and left. This was
a mission to find and collect evidence, not to arrest Justin.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
At that point, he was standing in the kitchen and
he started to talk to me and I said, just
shut the fuck up. I don't want to hear another
word out of your mouth. I need you to get
your shit and I need you to get out of
my house. And he was like, you're going to ruin
our marriage over this. Are you serious, Stacy? I said, no,
you ruined our marriage. I said, they showed me everything
(16:32):
down there. Justin He was like, I didn't do this,
you know, that's all lies.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Justin was maintaining his innocence. He started naming all of
the kids who might have been the culprit, but the
detective had wisely shown Stacey the photo of Justin's hand,
presumably testing the camera, and.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
I was like, m you gotta go. I said, it's
either you or me and these kids, so you need
to make it. And he's like, well, I'm not going
to make you and the kids leave the house tonight.
So that he ended up going and staying with one
of his co residents and just told her that we
were going through a divorce and that he just needed
a place to crash.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Stacy and the kids needed family and friends who were
like family, but those folks were back home in Virginia.
Once this story about Justin got back to his employer,
this house, they loved, this job he had worked so
hard for. It would all be over.
Speaker 5 (17:27):
The day after the raid, we were putting the house
of her sale. His mentality was, I'll finish out my
contract here, you know, and then we'll slowly work on,
like rebuilding our relationship. I mean, at the time, I
was trying to play the part like oh yeah, maybe,
but I was just like, oh yeah, Bunny, that's not happening.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Justin was adamant that he was innocent, but Stacy no
longer cared. She just wanted to keep her kids safe.
Speaker 5 (17:55):
I called my sister and I said, this is what's
going down. I think it's going to be bad. She
was like, oh my god, you got to get the
babies out of that house. And I said, I told
him he had to leave, but I'm moving home, and
she was like, shit, Stacy. School starts next week.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Heather was concerned about Tyler. He was in high school
and this move would mean a new school for him.
That was hard enough.
Speaker 5 (18:21):
She was like, we got to get him here to
get him enrolled in school. He can't get behind me.
I tell my husband what's going on, and my husband
says to me, we're going to get siglent her. And
my husband is one of those people that not a
lot of people will argue with.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
He's not taking over an answer. Tyler loved his ant Heather,
and knew on the day of the raid that his
life was going to change, but he never could have
predicted it would happen so fast.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
I'd gotten a text from my mom, Hey, when you
get home tonight, we're gonna pack up all your stuff.
You're going to live with your aunt. Heather like, Bam,
it's really getting real. Woke up that next morning. My
friend had come over because I'd told him I was leaving.
This was the same friend I'd stayed at after Social
(19:07):
Services came, so he kind of knew what was going on.
We hugged, which was not like us. You know, teenage
boys don't really do that, and like he actually shed
some tears.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
I did too.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
It was kind of like heartfelt but sad at the
same time. He was my best friend. I didn't have
much to leave him, but I was like, take this xbox,
It'll be like a good remember me bye. And then
I was off to my aunts to live for the
next year and a half or so.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
We've all seen those stories when a person with men
suddenly falls and is about to lose everything. Many times
they don't just bow out, They take people with them.
Usually it's those closest. Justin had lost his family, had
(20:09):
not seen his biological children, and it was just a
matter of time before he lose his ability to practice medicine.
What then, Stacy's mind went to worst case scenarios.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
I slept with a loaded gun next to me for
a long time. I Mean, my thought was his life
is falling apart. He's going to take us all down
with him.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
As heartbreaking as it was. Stacy moved quickly and put
the house on the market. I don't know if you
remember the housing market in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
I do.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
It didn't take long for prospective buyers to start looking
at Stacy's home.
Speaker 5 (20:52):
We were there at the house and they said the
new tenants were going to come for a walkthrough. I
think they got there early, so they came in and
I was They just kind of opened the door, walked
in and I was like, oh, I'm sorry, and I
just remember looking at him and I said, you know,
you're getting a really good house. It's a really good neighborhood.
I said, You're just you're really gonna love it here.
(21:14):
I said, I love my time here.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Her loss was there again, even in that moment, she
showed grace. She loved that house, she loved the life
she thought she was living. Mikayla had been living away
at college. Stacey knew that it would only be a
matter of time before she'd hear what happened. Stacey wanted
(21:36):
to be the one to tell her, but she didn't
want to break this type of news over the phone,
so she invited Mikaela and her boyfriend Tommy for the weekend.
When Michaela arrived at the house, she noticed something was
off right away.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Get there, and it's just oddly quiet in this house.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
That's when her much younger sister spilled the beans.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
She looks me dead in the face and says, Daddy
doesn't live here anymore, and Bubby's living with Aunt Heather.
And I was like what, And Mom, who hasn't said anything,
explained everything. You know that they raided the house. They
took all electronics.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Mikhayla thought there had to be some kind of mistake.
She just couldn't wrap her head around it, not justin.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
Immediately.
Speaker 4 (22:29):
I was kind of like, are we sure? You know
people put nanny cams all the time? Was it an accident?
Was it supposed to be like downstairs to maybe make
sure Dee, who lived with us, was taking care of
the kids, and somebody moved it.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
The stress of everything that was going on seemed to
be getting to justin. One of his patients noticed a
total transformation in his bedside manner.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
My name is Christina CALVAESSI I have to go to
the doc or for regular checkups. So I went and
I visited him. I liked him a lot. He was
very talkative, very interested to me. It was a great doctor.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Until he became preoccupied with his own problems.
Speaker 6 (23:16):
I never had an issue with him until the medication
that he put me on. It crippled me. I could
not walk. It was actually destroying my muscles, and the
side effects of that medication were exactly the side effects
that I was having. When I called his office and
(23:36):
asked that he called me back and talked to me directly,
he was very abrupt. It was not the same doctor
Rutherford that I knew.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Justin kept working. He still hadn't been charged with a crime. Still,
word of the raid was spreading through their circle of
friends and community.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
About a week or so later, I get a snapchat
message from one of Tyler's friends.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
It was a boy she knew well.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
He was at the house all the time when I
lived there. It was like another little brother to me.
We've had difficult conversations in the past about anxiety and depression.
He disclosed to me that Justin had sexually abused him.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Mikayla was devastated.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
I pulled over on the side of the road. I'm
like bawling my eyes out.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
I did tell him like I'm so sorry that happened
to you, but as somebody who works in healthcare, I
have to mandate report or I could lose my job.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Michaela was working in an outpatient psychiatry department, and she
took her mandate seriously. She explained that the police was
probably contact his parents and that she would be there
for him. But inside, Michaela was heartbroken. Justin was her dad.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
It was hard, you know, when you love somebody so much.
There's that little part that's like, what the heck is
going on?
Speaker 5 (25:19):
There's no way that.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
He could have done this, And then the bigger part
of me is like it doesn't matter, Like this kid
just told you that he was abused. You take that seriously.
Speaker 5 (25:30):
It's real.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Mikayla didn't go to work that day. Instead, she turned
around and drove herself straight to the police precinct to
report the text.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
On my way there, I had called my mom. I
asked her who the detectives were, and I think she
knew something was wrong. So I'm like, okay, I wasn't
gonna tell you.
Speaker 5 (25:53):
You're at work.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
I'm trying to drive. I'm trying to still process it,
but this is what happened.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Mikayla met with the detective at the police station to
share the text. It was evidence.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
I gave them my phone and they made copies or screenshots.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
These were serious allegations and now it was in the
detective's hands. She was a wreck and concern for the
victim that there wasn't much more for Mikayla to do,
or at least she thought. Detectives eventually pivoted and asked
her for help with the hitting camera case they were
building against Justin.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
And then they were like, we're gonna show you a
bunch of pictures. We need you to identify the individuals,
and the pictures.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
They were screen grabs the forensic team had pulled from
the hitting camera.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
And then they whip out this huge finder and they
just start flipping through it and it's like my brother's friends,
family members, all these people sitting on the toilet, brushing
their tea, using the shower. It was literally anything you
can think of.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
No one ever noticed the camera because it was disguised
as an everyday household item.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
It was like a cube and it charged your phone,
so it worked just like a phone block, but it
had a camera inside of it.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Mikhaela was still processing the abuse allegations and this new responsibility.
While it was awkward and just plain awful sitting there
identifying people hundreds of photos laid out in binders, Detectives
did their best to make her comfortable. Seeing your friends
(27:40):
and family getting in and out of the shower, they're naked.
Can you imagine it couldn't cover them up at least?
And when she thought it couldn't get any.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
Worse, it whipped out another binder and it was me.
So I dye my hair a lot, and I had
to identify myself in every different hairstyle, every different hair color.
And then they let me know that some of these
pictures were actually like they had clipped it from a video,
and the one picture was actually Tommy and I in
(28:13):
the bathroom together doing like sexual acts. I said, how
many people have seen this video? And he told me
all of the forensic team, all of the detectives on
the case, and I was like as white as a ghost.
Speaker 5 (28:29):
I wanted to throw up.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
And who could blame her? Detectives went to interview the
boy who said he was abused by Justin. Here's Sergeant
Fick again.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
I personally did a forensic interview and interviewed him, and
he disclosed being sexually abused by Justin.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Still, there were no charges, but Stacy wanted to get
away from the house. She reached a breaking point.
Speaker 5 (28:55):
I took the kids immediately and left the house with
nothing and went to Michaela's because her building was secure.
If you had to have a key to get in
the front, you had to have a key to get
on the elevator, and that key had to match the
floor that you lived on too.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Stacy shared the terrible development with her sister, Heather, and
Heather told Tyler at least her son was safe with
Heather and Virginia. For Stacy, Heather, and Mikayla, there was
a question that permeated all of their thoughts. If Justin
sexually assaulted Tyler's friend, was it possible that he prayed
on Tyler as well. Michayla couldn't stop thinking about that
(29:33):
text and her younger brother.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
Honestly, as soon as I opened the message from him,
I could feel it in my gut that he wasn't
the only one.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Stacy checked in with Tyler often. She asked him multiple
times if he was okay. She asked him after social
services came. She asked him again after the raid and
thought it was agonizing to raise it with him again.
She even asked her son after the sexual assault victim
came forward. He always reassured her, But there was so
(30:07):
much she didn't know, so much that happened right in
front of her. But she remembered what social services told her.
Speaker 5 (30:15):
We've interviewed Tyler. He loves his stepdad. If he's happy here,
he seems safe.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Everything was different now nobody had been safe. Heather thought
she had the best chance of approaching Tyler. He was
staying in her house.
Speaker 5 (30:33):
Heather was very proactive about something happened to Tyler. If
he did it to another boy, I just know it.
So she started immediately asking questions.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Her sister sought advice from a friend who was a
social worker. Here's Heather. She's like, you can't push him,
you can't pull it out of him. You just need
to continue to let him know that you're there.
Speaker 5 (30:59):
If he wants to check, you know you're there. They
would talk about it and then she'd let it go.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
While Stacey was agonizing over what may have happened to Tyler,
she noticed that Justin was making some unusual financial transactions.
She reached out a detective Weaver, who she had met
the knight of the raid.
Speaker 5 (31:17):
I remember texting Weaver in them saying he's going to run.
I feel it he's drawn out money. Oh, we got
eyes on him. We're good work.
Speaker 6 (31:24):
Good.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Detectives were not in a hurry to arrest Justin. They
were more interested in building a strong case than a
fast one. Remember, Stacy had caught him encrypting his computer,
so the only evidence they had in their case against
Justin at this point was the simcard from the camera
in the bathroom. But the victim coming forward, you may
(31:45):
be thinking there had to be an arrest warrant soon. Well,
not necessarily. Detectives were trying to corroborate the victim's story.
Law enforcement wouldn't just make an arrest without sufficient evidence.
They would need more.
Speaker 5 (32:01):
When it was just the camera charges, Detective Weaver had
said to me, this was a misdemeanor act, and that
with him having a clear history and no arrests or
any violence or anything like that, that they would look
at that, and they would look at kind of who
he was in society, and that more than likely he
would just get probation out of it, and it was
(32:25):
gross to me to think that you could walk away
with a misdemeanor and just have probation for looking at
naked children.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Maybe that was Justin's purpose for hiding the camera in
the bathroom, but the simcard contained images of children and adults.
A defense attorney could argue that it wasn't meant for
just kids. It was no slam dunk for a prosecutor.
Speaker 5 (32:50):
It was scary because I thought he's going to get
a misdemeanor. I mean, people get misdemeanors for stupid stuff
and still are able to see their kids. My thought was,
he's still gonna have access.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
To our children.
Speaker 5 (33:04):
I knew I was leaving. I knew I was divorcing him,
like there was no question, but to think that I
would have had to possibly drive my children to his
home and drop them off was just nauseating to me.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Heather was on the receiving end of Stacy's anguish.
Speaker 7 (33:20):
My sister had just called me and she's crying and
she's like this is crazy, Like how are they gonna.
Speaker 5 (33:25):
Let him go? And I'm like I know, oh, you know,
God's got this. We're going to figure this out. I
do not believe in my heart of hearts, this man
is going to walk free. And Tyler's listening to this.
Speaker 7 (33:36):
And I got off the phone and he was helping
me full laundry, and I said, man, buddy, I said.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (33:42):
We gotta do some serious pray. And he's like, why,
what's up.
Speaker 7 (33:47):
I said, they're talking about only charging Justin with the
cameras and he goes, well, what does that mean? And
I said, well, that probably means your little brother will
have visitation with his father.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
In due time.
Speaker 5 (34:03):
And he just looked at me.
Speaker 7 (34:06):
With look I will never forget, and his eyes welled
up with tears. And Tyler says, he'll never see the
outside of a prison when I tell them what I do.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
He had heard enough. The thought of Justin being alone
with his little brother, the idea that he could have visitation.
That was the tipping point. Tyler was ready to talk.
On the next episode of Betrayal.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
You know, they were at work making the money, doing
their jobs, and I was doing my job, keeping my
mouth shut to keep the family.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
Together, and Justin makes a run for it.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
I go to the house and his side of the
closet is gone. All of his stuff was gone. I
was like, oh shit, he's on the run.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team,
email us at betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal
Pod at gmail dot com. Also, please be sure to
follow us at Glass Podcasts on Instagram for all Betrayal content,
news and updates. We're grateful for your support. One way
to show support is by subscribing to our show on
(35:27):
Apple Podcasts and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal.
Five star reviews go a long way. A big thank
you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production
of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in
partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by
Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by me
(35:48):
Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Kerry Hartman, also produced
by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin Melcurie and Grace Bollinger.
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Crincheck. Special
thanks to Stacy Rutherford Tyler and the rest of Stacy
and Tyler's friends and family. Audio editing and mixing by
(36:08):
Matt tal Vecchio, editing support from Nico Aruka. Betrayals theme
composed by Oliver Bains. Music library provided by Mob Music
and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
Host
Andrea Gunning
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